The entire point is that your DE has NO security features at all, those come ALL from the underlying system such as PAM for example, managing the authentication and such.
These stupid strawmans “huhr dur watch a video”
Besides that I’ll just answer the straw man argument anyway because it’s even stupid if you take it seriously YES YOU CAN ACTUALLY LAUNCH GUI (such as a game) DIRECTLY FROM TTY.
I would love to only use the computer in tty but would be hard to edit images in GIMP. Or do you still launch GUI apps directly from tty? Most websites are an abomination viewed through lynx or similar.
The entire point is that your DE has NO security features at all, those come ALL from the underlying system such as PAM for example, managing the authentication and such.
These stupid strawmans “huhr dur watch a video”
Besides that I’ll just answer the straw man argument anyway because it’s even stupid if you take it seriously YES YOU DO ACTUALLY LAUNCH GUI DIRECTLY FROM TTY.
Your desktop handles Wayland, Xwayland, preinstalled apps, file management, some services and GUI integration, networking, Printing, Bluetooth, GPS (if available), cell data (if available)… so I would say it does in part come from the Desktop.
The Desktop is software which needs resources, gives access, reads and writes data,…
For example SELinux Confined Users break KDE, but not GNOME afaik
I don’t think it does. The services and apps are all broken down into smaller chunks so there isn’t going to be a clear desktop that’s better. I haven’t heard of any CVEs in KDE or gnome either so I’m not convinced that my desktop is a threat. For me the biggest threat is my web browser and physical security
This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:
Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
Do you want it to be used by many people and you don’t want them to be able to steal each others secrets?
Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.
With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your “Security Enhanced” Linux profile – or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.
With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.
Never heard of these jails, like bubblejail? Its available on Linux too.
I know the question is vague and highly dependend on Threat model etc. Pre-enabled services, distribution adding stuff to it, SELinux confined user (not working with Plasma at all), xwayland support for keylogging chosen keys (Plasma).
Also GTK is widely used for rust apps, this doesnt exist on Plasma at all, not a problem though as Plasma is not Gnome and simply supports GTK normally.
I don’t think the DE itself matters, but I can recommend using an immutable OS (makes it harder to install malware) and installing flatpak apps only. You can also use software like flatseal to further lock down permissions
A mostly read only filesystem built from a limited number of packages, with other files being in a fixed number of locations mean it is harder for malware to hide.
You can achieve the exact same thing with a normal distro if you mount /var and /boot separately of /. And if you get a root exploit it’s just as harmful on either approach.
“Immutable” systems are meant for maintainer comfort not for user security.
No, you can’t : in an immutable distro I can reasonably trace almost any file in the filesystem back to the package that created it, and know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the installed version of said file has not been tampered with. That isn’t possible an a normal distro.
Sure it is, has been for decades. You can use a read-only root partition, there are many tools to ensure the integrity of everything on it, and tracing files back to their package is a very old feature.
Ublue is like rpmfusion but for image-based. Its the addition to fedora, with packages they can’t ship. They replace all the libav* with complete ffmpeg which is pretty great as its a great tool and Firefox works ootb.
For example they have -nvidia images for every image, which is the best way to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers as you can roll back and a broken update simply wont ship to you.
They also have modded kernel images for Razer, Surface and a special Framework image.
Another cool project basing off their “starting point” toolkit to create custom images, is secureblue, a security-optimized Version including
hardened kernel and hardened_malloc
updated Chromium, maybe soon Brave
soon a hardened Chromium (currently as COPR “vanadium”) like GrapheneOS
hardened services, firewall
removed unused kernel modules
It is very security focused though, so no Firefox, no Flatpak as its currently broken, Podman (distrobox, toolbox) is currently not working and its unclear if that is actually necessary, …
Bluefin is their fancy distro with lots of Tools, a custom Desktop, integrated Developer packages and more.
“Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]”
Wayland is Wayland. If you use a Wayland compositor, you’re getting a lot of security by virtue of design alone. Things like keyloggers and screenrecorders will not be able to intrude on your session barring vulnerability exploits. I’m not going to touch on the relative vulnerability risk of each environment since a) they’re all relatively new & b) I’ve never implemented Wayland myself
With that being said, here’s what’s not protected by Wayland regardless of the chosen compositor: microphones, webcams, keyrings, and files.
For microphones & webcams, any distro which rolls Pipewire in combination with Wayland will be sufficient to secure these. Pretty much all Wayland environments roll Pipewire so this is only important to consider if you’re running your own customized environment (be sure to disable any pre-existing PulseAudio daemon after setting up Pipewire to close this security hole)
For keyrings, these are handled by your environment’s polkit implementation. Much like Wayland, there are several implementations of polkit and they’re all just about equally secure barring any potential vulnerabilities… Just make sure that you’re using an encrypted database (usually on by default) and that you have it configured to always relock & properly prompt for the unlock key.
For file access, this is actually a core probelm with Linux as a whole – any unsandboxed application you run will be able to read any file that you can read. The solution is to use sandboxed applications whenever possible. The easiest way to achieve this is through using flathub/flatpak applications, since they will always list out and enforce their required permissions on a per-application basis. For non-flatkpak applications, you’ll need to use “jail” environments (e.g.: bubblejail, firejail) in order to artificially restrict application permissions by hand.
All else being equal, less code and less dependencies is safer. The bigger the application and the more it tries to do, the larger its attack surface.
(Again, all else being equal. DWM is probably smaller than Weston, but Weston doesn’t let just any old process log keypresses or take screenshots, so probably at least arguable to say that Weston is (qualifier, handwave, condition, clarification) “safer.”)
I see you post a lot about security so I just wanted to chime in and say that maybe just use what works well for you because there’s nothing inherently safe, only stuff that is easier to break and stuff that takes more time. The only real way to be safe is to be prudent with what you download and what you do on the internet.
Could you provide some criteria for what you’re looking for in the way of security? Wayland is far better for security than Xorg, but it’s hard to say how much it varies between wayland compositors. I can’t imagine it would matter too much, but depending on how much security you’re looking for, choosing more minimal software is probably better. Rust can be better for security but I’m not entirely sure how much can really get compromised through poor memory management in a window manager.
Add comment